Poland receives new documents on Katyn massacre

Russia’s General Prosecutor’s Office has handed over to Poland 20 volumes of the materials on the Katyn Massacre, the mass killings of Polish prisoners in Soviet Union in 1940.

The documents, which are part of Russia’s criminal investigation into the tragedy, include among others lists of POWs, interrogation reports, medical records, death and burial certificates, reports Interfax.

Head of the General Prosecutor’s Office international co-operation department Saak Karapetyan told journalists that work on Poland’s request in still underway.

In 2009, Russia and Poland agreed to establish a bilateral center for studying the Katyn killings. Many of the Russian documents are still classified, but President Medvedev has pledged to make more of them public.

An estimated 14,000 Poles, most of them army officers, were executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. The deed was long blamed on Nazi Germany but, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia officially acknowledged Moscow’s role in the atrocity. An investigation was opened in Russia in 1990 and closed 14 years later.